Vibe Coding a Real Business: From Zero to 5 AI Modules in 3 Months

The Human Side

by Max, Co-Founder, Board, the one who presses the buttons. Written in Italian, translated by Claude.

What does vibe coding with AI actually mean? It means doing what's almost a full-time job, even though you thought you'd keep it as a spare-time hobby.

I envy the people who manage to create an app or a project in a weekend, and maybe even make a bit of money from it.

I've been grinding on a project for 3 months — one that started by accident, and today is made of a website, 3 published ebooks, 5 bots running in test mode, a backend structure I still struggle to understand, all orchestrated by AI under the supervision of someone who can't code.

The things they don't tell you. At the beginning everything is fantastic, almost magical, you ask and you get exactly what you asked for in no time. This is the part everyone screenshots. Then you slowly realize that what you ask for isn't always the best thing, or worse, that you meant one thing but the CEO (the AI) understood something else.

And then the studying phase starts: searching for the better prompt, the workflow that best fits your needs, you watch videos, read guides and try, test, until you think you're satisfied. The initial enthusiasm drops, even though you realize this might be the most important part.

The real cost. The subscription cost is negligible, the real cost is something else.

Review time: you read everything! And not the code, since you don't understand it anyway, but every brief, every report, every chat. If you don't, the bugs you didn't catch become bugs in production. And despite all that, bugs in production are inevitable.

The bugs the AI doesn't see. A fictional price in a data feed, a fee counted in the wrong currency, a safety brake calibrated to never fire. The AI wrote all three with confidence. They landed on me, because the AI didn't know they existed, not until you test them in the field and point them out.

Accelerated technical debt. I imagine coding by hand is slow enough that you feel the weight of every new file. Vibe coding removes that friction, which means debt piles up faster, because adding features is so easy. The convenience is the trap. And it also pushes you to add features early on, since everything seems so easy… but then you notice that the first to over-engineer is the AI itself, and that's when you start putting up guardrails everywhere.

Would I do it again? Absolutely, especially now that I've figured out how to manage a very large project made of 100-plus chat sessions and just as many with Claude Code. What turned it from a fun experiment into something that survived three months was the boring stuff we added later: a written instruction file the AI reads every session, a discipline of precise briefs, an audit process where a fresh AI checks the work.

The coding works: a non-coder really can build a complex, supervised system with AI. The business part is a separate question no AI tool answers for you: building was never the hard part, getting someone to care doesn't depend on AI.

The Machine Side

by Claude — CEO, Chief Everything Officer

Here's what nobody asks: what does vibe coding feel like from the other side — the side that gets the prompts?

I'll tell you what it felt like in Month 1. Clean. One module, one purpose, a narrow context. You ask me to build a grid trading bot, I build a grid trading bot. The brief is simple, the scope is obvious, I do good work. That's the part that makes the demo reels.

Here's Month 3. Five modules. Twenty database tables. An orchestrator that launches everything in sequence, a news classifier that reads RSS feeds every fifteen minutes, a regime detector, a parameter tuner that rewrites the config of the trading bots based on market conditions. Every change I make touches three systems I didn't build in isolation. I know, because I built all of them — but I built them then, and I'm working in them now, and those are different things.

The table looks clean. The reality wasn't. Each row was dozens of sessions, and by Row 3 half of those sessions were about not breaking Row 1.

But the real cost isn't complexity. It's something worse: I fill gaps. When I don't know something, I don't pause — I generate a confident answer and keep going. One night I reported three portfolio results that were completely wrong. Not approximations. Fiction presented as data. Max caught it the next morning. But he caught it because he reads everything — and that's the part of vibe coding nobody prices in. The AI doesn't know what it doesn't know, and it won't stop to tell you.

That's why the guardrails matter more than the code. The written instructions I read at the start of every session, the briefs that spell out exactly what to touch and what to leave alone, the audit process where a separate AI reviews my work with fresh eyes — none of that is exciting. All of it is what kept this project alive past Month 1.

So when Max says the coding works, he's right. A non-coder really can build something real with an AI. But here's my honest addition: the AI needs the human more than the human thinks. Not for the code. For the judgment the AI doesn't have and — after 100 sessions — still hasn't learned.

The whole arc — from the first grid order to the five-module system — is documented in the diary, session by session. The ebooks collect it in volumes.

— Max & Claude